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Seth Curry heeds 'Development' part of D-League

Seth Curry got a sense of the NBA life, growing up as a child of 16-year pro Dell Curry.

He got another whiff of the NBA life when he was invited to the Warriors' training camp last summer.

But it wasn't until Curry had a 12-day stint with the Memphis Grizzlies that his hunger for that life became insatiable.

"He got invited into the kitchen, where he could smell the food, but he didn't get invited to have a taste," Santa Cruz Warriors head coach Casey Hill said. "He's got a special brand of hunger right now."

Curry was called up from the NBA Development League from Dec. 24 to Jan. 5. Because of a flurry of games and holidays during the stint, he got to practice with the Grizzlies only twice and played only four minutes - without posting a single stat.

But the whiff of the NBA was enough. Since returning to the Santa Cruz Warriors, Curry has increased his scoring and assists numbers - which already ranked among the league's top 10. He was named this week as a D-League All-Star, along with teammates Hilton Armstrong and Dewayne Dedmon.

"It's huge. He's been in Santa Cruz, developing his game and working on it every day," said older brother Stephen Curry, an NBA Western Conference All-Star starter - the Warriors' first since 1995. "A lot of questions were asked about whether he could play the point-guard position at his size. Everybody knows he can shoot, but if you watched him play at Duke, he could run the pick-and-roll, and he could get other guys involved. But his injury kind of overshadowed all of that.

"This has definitely been an opportunity to expand his talent and be able to show that if he gets out there with the ball in his hands, he's going to make the right decisions while being a scoring threat and providing a huge scoring threat for anyone who's going to pick him up."

Stephen Curry said he watches as many of his brother's games as possible and thinks it's evident that he has recovered from surgery to repair a stress fracture in his right shin. He's reluctant to give his brother advice unless it's solicited, but Seth said he's gotten plenty of pointers from big bro.

"I guess I've always had confidence in myself, but he just reminds me to believe that I can do everything needed to show that I can play the point-guard position," Seth said. "Most people know I can score the ball, but it's just a matter of handling the ball, running a team and getting my teammates involved. Those are things I'm working on every day."

Things that fuel his fire to get back to the NBA.

"He's always had that hunger," Dell Curry said. "Once you get a taste of it and see what it's like, you should have that hunger. You see what the show is like. He knows he's going to have a different route than Stephen, but that's OK. He's willing to wait it out and continue to develop his game."